Wednesday, May 9, 2018

For supporters of President Donald Trump, it’s the Deep State at its most dangerous.

When former President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan took to MSNBC in March to insinuate that the White House is vulnerable to specific, personal blackmail by Russian President Vladimir Putin, liberals hailed it as the kind of “truth to power moment” they needed to tarnish the Trump presidency as fundamentally flawed.

But a veteran of the Cold War’s shadowy front lines is fighting back.

In an interview with The Washington Times published Monday, Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, said Brennan’s deliberate smearing of the president — without a shred of evidence to back it up — was the kind of partisan tactic that could directly damage the work of intelligence agencies in the field.

If Brennan really was alarmed at a potential security threat involving Trump being vulnerable to Russian pressure, Hoffman said, he could have brought it up to special counsel Robert Mueller, who has now spent almost a year investigating the possibility of “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign.

“That way, he could avoid collateral damage to those with whom we are working, whether it’s a spy who’s risking his life to be the source of secrets for us, who’s now going to wonder whether he should be doing that because his boss Vladimir Putin has dirt on our president, or a partner liaison service, which might want to work with us against the Russia target,” Hoffman told the Times.

But that isn’t what Brennan chose to do at all. Instead, he sat on the set of the rabidly anti-Trump “Morning Joe” program and said something about the president of the United States that had to chill any American.

“I think he is afraid of the president of Russia,” Brennan said. “…I think one can speculate as to why. That the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult. Clearly, I think it’s important for us to be able to improve relations with Russia, but the fact that he has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin, has not said anything negative about him, I think continues to say to me that he does have something to fear and something very serious to fear.”

(Check out the video on RealClear Politics here. Brennan’s sneering attititude make the words even worse than they appear in print. And he doesn’t look like he’s guessing.)

Brennan later tried to walk back that damning statement, telling The New York Times in an interview after the appearance that his words had been entirely speculative.

“I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they...Read More HERE